Alpine’s Mexico City Points Vanished Under Two Yellow-Flag Penalties

Lauren Miller Published: November 2, 2026 | Updated: November 2, 2026 5 minutes read

Photo by Der_ Hördt on <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/pit-crew-preparing-for-race-day-action-32543849/" rel="nofollow">Pexels.com</a>

Alpine finished Sunday’s Mexico City Grand Prix with two cars in the points. By the time Mexico City was asleep, it had none. Two stewards’ decisions issued after the race wiped out both results, and the paperwork hands a rival a bigger lead in the fight for fifth in the constructors’ championship.

What the stewards confirmed

Both decisions are FIA documents for the 2026 Mexico City Grand Prix, issued to the Alpine team manager within two minutes of each other on Sunday evening, local time. Here is what they say:

Pierre Gasly (Document 84, issued 19:33): passed through a double-yellow sector at 16:04 without making the required reduction in speed, a breach of Article B1.8.4b of the F1 regulations. Penalty: a stop-and-go imposed after the race, plus two penalty points.
Franco Colapinto (Document 85, issued 19:35): passed through a single-yellow sector at the same time without slowing enough, a breach of Article B1.8.4a. Penalty: a 10-second time penalty and one penalty point, taking his 12-month total to five.
The evidence fight: both drivers and the team argued they had slowed. The stewards reviewed telemetry, in-car video, timing and marshalling data, and for Gasly compared his telemetry against other cars through the same sector. They were not persuaded.
A partial win for Colapinto: the stewards found enough doubt over whether he had adequate warning in the preceding double-yellow sector, so no breach was found there.
The scoreboard: both drivers lost their points finishes. Formula 1’s race report has Isack Hadjar moving up to ninth and Haas’s Ryo Hirakawa to tenth, and the FIA points document shows Hirakawa on one point.
Standings after Mexico City (FIA points document): Racing Bulls 108 points and Alpine 69 in the constructors’ table, with Hadjar on 107, Liam Lawson on 83, Gasly on 42 and Colapinto on 27 in the drivers’ standings. The FIA notes the standings remain subject to a notice of intention to appeal from Audi over a separate Italian Grand Prix decision.

The race itself was already crowded with news: Max Verstappen won, and Kimi Antonelli took the world title, a result we had mapped out in advance in our breakdown of what it would take to delay his championship. Alpine’s penalties were a footnote to that on Sunday. They are not a footnote in the midfield.

A car racing venue with grandstands beside the track — Photo by Laura Paredis on Pexels

What it means, and where analysis begins

Everything above is confirmed. What follows is analysis.

Fifth place is now a long shot, not a lost cause. Alpine trails Racing Bulls by 39 points. A race win plus a second place is worth 43, so the gap is smaller than a single perfect weekend for the chasing team. The problem is that Alpine would need that weekend, and Racing Bulls would need to collect almost nothing in return. Racing Bulls has two cars that are regularly in the points, and Lawson, who has been in our coverage as a driver other series keep eyeing, is on 83 points by himself. Alpine did not lose fifth in the stewards’ room, but it lost the cushion it needed to get there.

The sting is the timing. Alpine’s pair converted a messy race into points on the road, and a yellow-flag decision that came down to a handful of telemetry traces erased it. Stewards compared Gasly against other cars rather than against a published threshold, and the documents do not say what speed reduction would have been enough. For teams, that is a cue to treat yellow-flag compliance as something you demonstrate relative to the field, not something you can argue after the fact with a single trace.

Colapinto’s licence is now the longer-term story. Five penalty points over 12 months puts him inside striking distance of the twelve-point threshold that triggers a one-race ban under the superlicence system. That is still a long way off, but the clock on each point runs for a year, so a few more marginal calls could matter quickly. Gasly’s two points are less of a concern.

Watch for an appeal. Both documents note the right to appeal under Article 15 of the International Sporting Code. I have not seen an appeal confirmed in the FIA documents. If Alpine does contest either decision, the difference between a double-yellow and a single-yellow sector in Colapinto’s case is where the argument will start.

A man holding a checkered flag at a race track — Photo by Alex Urezkov on Pexels

The wider pattern is how often a title-clinching headline hides the result that matters to the teams below it. Antonelli’s coronation, covered in our look at Italy’s long wait for a champion, will be the line in the history books. For Alpine, the line in the accounts is 39 points and a stewards’ decision it cannot take back.